In 2001, it was estimated that 192,000 women would be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer; 40,600 women would die from it. Current staging modalities for breast cancer are invasive, expensive, may miss metastatic cells, and limit the ability of clinicians to tailor therapies to individual patients. Our hypothesis is that multi-marker real-time RT-PCR detection of breast cancer cells in paraffin embedded lymph nodes of breast cancer patients will provide a sensitive, cost effective, and widely applicable method for the detection of breast cancer metastases. We propose to accomplish this by: (1) establishing an isolation method for the recovery of RNA obtained from nodes embedded in paraffin, (2) confirming that a novel panel of seven breast cancer-associated RNA can be detected from paraffin embedded tissue (PET), and (3) validating the commercial application of multi-marker real-time RT-PCR through a feasibility study using PET samples from diverse sources. The long term goal of this study is to develop an innovative diagnostic test, with broad based applications and marketability, with the potential to reduce morbidity and mortality in women with breast cancer. In addition, the platform of multi-markers using real-time RT-PCR can be expanded to other cancers.